System Administrator

Category Archives: VMware

The case: You have multiple virtual machines that you don’t want to expose directly to the internet and you prefer routing them through a single virtual machine. This is also handy if you are short on IPs. Our case is OVH specific and it will give you a guide on how to set things up on OVH weird network topology. Reason why we use ipcop instead of pfsense is because pfsense doesn’t support a 32bit net mask. No matter what i’ve tried i could get it to work with a 32 bit netmask and gateway on separate network. So IpCop was the next best thing and it does the job quite well.

Proceed on creating a new VM including both NICs the one that you just created and the one that connects you to the outside world.

Then move on with standard installation of IPcop. Keep in mind that your RED network will be the one connecting outside and the GREEN one will be your internal nat network. If you are not sure of the network settings while installing proceed and will edit network config later on anyways.

After installation login to the machine and now let’s edit the files needed for proper networking under OVH routers.

Hello.
Recently one of our VMware ESXi servers started acting up weird.
Situation was that we had no means of accessing ESXi through SSH ( user/pass got refused although it was the right one) and the console was also unaccesible for each VM.
After invastigating a bit through the Vsphere Client it appearead that the system couldn’t find the necessary pam modules and thus no authentication for us.
Hopefully at least we had access through the VSphere Client and also to the Web-Based datastore Browser.
Anyway to make long story short we had to find a way of getting our VMs from there and moving them to another machine.
Typically and afaik we would simply login on our ESXi console and scp our files through the servers. In our case that was no option since we had no ssh access at all. So we came up with two solutions.

General Prerequisites

Power off your VM while transferring.

Make sure there are no snapshots.

If you got snapshots take care of them and delete. You can’t move snapshots and you have to have only “the current working branch” .